Chapter VI · TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS

The choice to which the modern man will finally be reduced, it has been said, is that of being a Bolshevist or a Jesuit. In that case (assuming that by Jesuit is meant the ultramontane Catholic) there does not seem to be much room for hesitation. Ultramontane Catholicism does not, like Bolshevism, strike at the very root of civilization. In fact, under certain conditions that are already partly in sight, the Catholic Church may perhaps be the only institution left in the Occident that can be counted on to uphold civilized standards. It may also be possible, however, to be a thoroughgoing modern and at the same time civilized. Before considering this possibility more in detail, it will be helpful to trace the process by which the present situation has grown up, a situation that seems, at least superficially, to impose the extreme choice I have just mentioned.

In tracing this process everything will be found to hinge ultimately on the idea of liberty in its relation to the principle of control. Under the old order, spiritual control, I have said, had its final source and sanction in the doctrine of grace. We need, therefore, to follow to some extent the fortunes of this doctrine as affected by the progressive emancipation, since the Renaissance, of the individual from outer authority and by the concomitant growth of naturalistic tendencies. Certain groups within the Church itself, notably the Jansenists, sought to revive, in opposition to the incipient naturalistic movement, the doctrine of grace in its full Augustinian rigor. This doctrine originally marked the very apex of Christian otherworldliness, whereas, at the time of the Jansenist revival, men were turning more and more resolutely to this world. Saint-Evremond estimates that there were not ten men in France who could satisfy the Jansenist test of holiness. All other Frenchmen the Jansenists seemed to consign to outer darkness. In standing for a more moderate interpretation of grace the Catholic Church simply showed its good sense. What was more dubious was its tendency to substitute for the inner dependence of man on God that the Jansenist desired, his outer dependence on the priest. My present subject does not require me to consider the truth of the charge that the Church, in the effort to induce the individual to submit to its authority, dissimulated unduly the austerity of Christian doctrine; that, in short, it gave countenance to a casuistical relaxation, the upshot of which was, in Bossuet’s phrase, to put “cushions under the elbows of sinners.” All I need to point out here is that the reply of the Church to individualistic tendencies of every kind has been an ever-increasing papal centralization. It may be said of the ultramontane Catholic, as of the extreme partisan of grace, though in a very different sense, that he has simply repudiated self-reliance.

If one wishes to understand the types of individualism to which ultramontane Catholicism is such an uncompromising answer, one needs to study also the doctrine of grace in its relation to the Protestant Reformation. Both Luther and Calvin, it is scarcely necessary to say, put prime emphasis on this doctrine, though not quite the same emphasis. Now the Reformation is, by its underlying postulates, a critical movement; it sought to recover the authentic Christian doctrine that seemed to it to have been perverted by the Roman theocracy. It urged the individual to take a critical attitude towards this theocracy, or, what amounts to the same thing, it urged him to exercise the right of private judgment, which is only another way of encouraging him to be self-dependent and self-reliant. But the Protestant was involved in peculiar difficulties as soon as he set out to be self-reliant and at the same time to defend the doctrine of grace; for the doctrine, in the Pauline and Augustinian form that a Luther and a Calvin sought to revive, was the very negation of self-reliance; it was designed to make man feel his utter and helpless dependence on the divine will. If a man is to be self-reliant, two things, it should seem, are necessary: he must have sound standards and must then be free to act on them. To secure the standards he needs intellect and to act on them he needs will. Luther, for his part, wishes to be an individualist and at the same time to follow the early Christian obscurantists in flouting the intellect and denying the freedom of the will. Since the “covenant of work” was abrogated by the Fall, man’s will is in helpless bondage to sin,⁠[79] so that God alone is capable of any salutary working; man’s only hope, therefore, is in the covenant of grace and the scheme of redemption. To hold any other view is subversive of humility. Luther’s extreme hostility to work is, of course, due also to the identification of work with the performance of rites and ceremonies, especially in connection with penance (satisfactio operis).

Luther and the other reformers had by their separation from the Church cut themselves off more or less from the traditional symbols by which the truths of humility and of the higher will were interpreted to the imagination; so that, in their defence of these truths, they were thrown back, almost in spite of themselves, on reason. Erasmus with his fine psychological tact felt in the Reformation, almost from the outset, an element of intellectual presumption. If the impression that Calvin produces in his preaching of man’s utter dependence on the divine will is not precisely that of humility, one suspects that the explanation is that he presumes to know too much about that will. Jonathan Edwards, again, in his anxiety to justify rationally God’s absolute and arbitrary will, finally seems to have insinuated himself as a fourth into the council chamber of the Trinity.

It is fair to say that the difficulty that confronted a Calvin and an Edwards and has led to at least a partial breakdown of Protestantism is no slight one: it must confront in some measure any one who seeks to combine a free play of the critical spirit with the acceptance of traditional Christianity. If one starts, as the traditional Christian has been wont to start, with the hypothesis of an omnipotent God with “foreknowledge absolute,” the question almost inevitably arises why such a being has permitted evil at all. Furthermore, strict logic would seem to impose the conclusion that this being has doomed a multitude of his creatures to everlasting torments simply for doing what, in the last analysis, he himself has willed.⁠[80] In short, the critical crux at the heart of historical Christianity is how to reconcile God’s omnipotence and omniscience with his justice and mercy. The portion of the world that piques itself on its modernity has simply turned its back on this theological nightmare. Unfortunately, in getting rid of the nightmare, it has also tended to get rid of the inner life, of the truth, namely, that man needs in his natural self (which includes the intellect) to look up to some higher will in awe and humility. With the decline of the inner life, there has been a weakening of control over the expansive lusts of the natural man—whether the lust of knowledge or the lust of sensation or the lust of power.

In the development I have been following, the idea of work in the spiritual sense is either very much subordinated to grace or else is more or less identified with the performance of rites and ceremonies.⁠[81] We need to trace at this point the rise of a very different doctrine of work. The last scholastics, notably Duns Scotus, inclined to divorce religious truth from reason and to identify it with absolute, arbitrary will and unintelligible theological mysteries. A man like Francis Bacon takes theologians of this type at their word and, after a more or less sincere obeisance to a spiritual truth that is immeasurably beyond man’s grasp, he turns an intellect that is left without other occupation to a study of the natural order. He aims to establish upon this order a philosophy, not of vain words, but of works and fruits. The Baconian conception of work can be followed down through the utilitarian movement. It appears, for example, in an extreme form in Locke’s second “Treatise of Government.” Work is practically identified by Locke with physical effort and is made the sole legitimate source of property. Adam Smith tends to a very similar conception of work in its relation to property. In thus reducing the idea of work to its lowest terms, the orthodox political economy opened the way for political economy of the unorthodox type. Karl Marx was especially influenced in his definition of work by Ricardo. Why should not the man who, on the showing of the orthodox political economists themselves, does the real work, get all the reward? Why should he turn over such a large part of this reward to that mere idler and parasite, the capitalist? Though the orthodox economist makes work in an unduly restricted sense the source of wealth, he does not, to do him justice, fall, like the Marxian, into the further fallacy of identifying work with value. That, he insists, is largely determined by the law of supply and demand and by competition. The extreme Marxian not only takes a purely quantitative view of work, so much so that he tends, as has been said, to put the work of a Raphael and that of a common sign painter on the same level, but in evaluating the product of work he aims to eliminate the competitive element. Recent Marxians have come to take a somewhat less quantitative view of work, but the fallacies that result from a total or partial suppression of competition are built into the very foundations of socialism.

One should note at this point that in their views as to the nature of work there is much underlying agreement between the Rousseauist and the Baconian. Rousseau himself tends to reduce work to the lowest terms and to identify it with manual labor. All who do not work in this outward and visible sense are, it would seem, hangers-on and parasites and not worthy to live.⁠[82] The attempt to apply the utilitarian-sentimental conception of work and at the same time to eliminate competition has resulted in Russia in a ruthless despotism, on the one hand, and in a degrading servitude, on the other.

A conception of work that means practically a return to barbarism evidently suffers from some serious flaw. The man who wishes to be at once modern and civilized will not oppose to the Baconian or Rousseauistic one-sidedness a mere appeal to the past, but a more accurate definition. Aristotle was, according to Bacon, the “vile plaything of words.” As a matter of fact, the surest way to become the vile plaything of words is, like both Bacon and Rousseau, to look on visible and concrete objects as “real” and on words, in contrast with these objects, as unreal. Words, especially abstract words, have such an important relation to reality because they control the imagination which in turn determines action and so “governs mankind.” The way to escape from the tyranny of words is not to dismiss them as unreal in favor of objects of sense, but to submit them to a searching Socratic dialectic. The only way, for instance, not to be the dupe of the general term “work” is to divide or “dichotomize” it Socratically and so become aware of the different meanings of which it is susceptible. The fallacies involved in a purely quantitative definition of work are almost too gross to need refuting. As Mencius remarked long ago, it is both proper and inevitable that the man who works with his mind should hold sway over the man who works only with his hands. As a result of the concentrated mental effort of the gifted few, an effort displayed either in invention or else in organization and management, the common laborer may to-day enjoy comforts that were out of the reach even of the opulent only two or three generations ago. If the laborer wishes to add to these comforts or even to keep them, he should not listen to the agitator who seeks to stir up his envy of every form of superiority. He should be the first to recognize that exceptional capacity should receive exceptional rewards.

The laborer, to be sure, has a grievance: this grievance is that those who have been set over him have concentrated so exclusively in their mental working on the material order. The real problem is to subordinate to some adequate end the enormous mass of machinery of power and comfort that has been the fruit of working of the utilitarian type; and here a specifically ethical type of working is needful. Now this specifically ethical working has been associated traditionally in the Occident with the doctrine of grace; for man to substitute his work for that of God seemed to be subversive of humility. Yet thus to emphasize God’s working led, I have tried to show, to an impossible theological dilemma; so that men tended, in getting rid of the dilemma, to get rid of the true work of the spirit in favor of a merely Baconian working. The problem would seem to be to recover the truths of grace in some individualistic form. We may be aided in this task by turning for a moment to the Far-Eastern teacher who combined humility with the ultimate degree of spiritual self-reliance. The word karma (work) has come to have in the Occident a sort of mystical glamour. But it is well to remember that this word is employed by Buddha himself in the most business-like fashion. The man who wishes, he says, to be a carpenter must do the work of a carpenter; the man who wishes to be a king must do the work of a king; the man who wishes to be a saint must do the work of a saint. One simply passes, as one mounts in the scale, from an outer to an inner working. The individual is to impose progressively his ethical will, affirmed as an immediate fact of consciousness, upon his outgoing desires. He is to perform this work of the spirit with a view to his own happiness, or, what amounts to the same thing in the eyes of the Buddhist, with a view to his own peace. “By rousing himself,” says Buddha, “by strenuousness, by restraint and control, the wise man may make for himself an island which no flood can overwhelm.” The supreme contrast in this faith is always that between the spiritually strenuous person and the spiritual idler.

Though probably no other teacher of the past has dealt with the idea of work so thoroughly as Buddha, the Buddhist emphasis does not seem just what we need to-day. Buddha was, like Christ, very otherworldly. The work in which he was primarily interested was of the type that leads to saintliness. It may show a lack of imagination on my part, but I cannot imagine my contemporaries in the rôle of saints. Perhaps no age was ever more lacking in otherworldliness or showed a greater incomprehension of religion. We have converted Buddha into a sort of heavy-eyed pessimistic dreamer, and, following Rousseau, have sentimentalized the figure of Christ. It might be well, therefore, for us to undertake something more within our capacity than religion. In general, for one person who has even an inkling of the nature of a genuinely religious working and of the strenuous peace at which religion aims, at least a hundred persons can be found who can grasp to some extent the type of work that has its fruition in the mediatory or humanistic virtues. Now humanism must, like religion, rest on the recognition, in some form or other, of the inner life, or, what amounts to the same thing, on the opposition between a law of the spirit and a law of the members. It must also, like religion, subordinate intellect to the ethical will and so put its ultimate emphasis on humility. In this matter of humility the Western humanist has something to learn, as I have already hinted, from Confucian China.

Though religion and the best type of humanism are at one in stressing humility, they diverge widely in their attitude towards the expansive desires. In its pursuit of the otherworldly virtue of peace, religion tends to renounce these desires completely, whereas humanism would simply moderate and harmonize them with a view to living to the best advantage in this world. As a result of his particular confusion of the things of God and the things of Cæsar, the humanitarian would have us set up peace as a primary good in the secular order. He hopes to secure this peace by some form of machinery (such as a league of nations) or else by an appeal to emotion. “Peace is my passion,” exclaimed the expansive Thomas Jefferson. But the person who turns peace into a passion is not entering upon the pathway of peace either within himself or in the outer world. It is possible to show that the pacifist is not only a materialist, but a very objectionable type of materialist. In the name of the fairest of virtues, he is actually engaged in breaking down ethical standards. It is a matter of common sense and everyday experience that there can be no peace with the unrighteous and the unrighteous always have been and are extremely numerous. As another instance of the humanitarian confusion of values, one may cite the assertion of Woodrow Wilson that a nation may be “too proud to fight.” An individual may be too humble to fight, but a nation that is too proud to fight may, in a world like this, be too proud to survive as a nation. The virtue that sums up all other virtues in the secular order is, as every thinker worthy of the name has always seen, not peace but justice. Now any one who deals positively with the idea of justice will almost inevitably be led to define it: To every man according to his works; and the adequacy of this definition will depend in turn on the adequacy of one’s definition of work.

The humanitarians, I have pointed out, from Bacon down, are extraordinarily superficial in their definition of work. Even when they do not fall into the cruder quantitative fallacies, they conceive of work in terms of the natural law and of the outer world and not in terms of the inner life.⁠[83] They do not take account of that form of work which consists in the superimposition of the ethical will upon the natural self and its expansive desires. The very notion of this form of work has, I have said, tended to disappear with the decline of the doctrine of grace.

If we grant, then, that what is needed just now is a revival of the ethical will on the secular level, where it is felt as a will to justice, rather than on the religious level, where it is felt as a will to peace, and if we grant further that justice, positively defined, consists in giving to every man according to his works, let us seek to restore to the idea of work the elements that have been omitted by the humanitarians. We may be aided in such a restoration by Greek philosophy, even though we do not agree with the tendency of the Socratic group to identify right reason and right will. The Platonic definition of justice as doing one’s own work or minding one’s own business has perhaps never been surpassed. It brings one straight back to the truths of the inner life. Justice results when every part of a man is performing its proper function and especially when his higher self is performing its proper function of coördinating and controlling the inferior parts of his nature. An echo of this Platonic conception is found in the Senecan definition of justice: Animus quodam modo se habens. Justice in the outer world must, in the last analysis, be only a reflection of the harmony and proportionateness that have resulted in certain individuals from the working of the spirit upon itself.

Aristotle’s view of justice has much in common with the Platonic view. In defining justice he starts, not from society, but from the individual who limits desires that are in themselves insatiable and imposes upon them the law of measure. A State in which such individuals are sufficiently numerous to set the tone is a just State. Justice, whether retributive or distributive, must be proportionate in its rewards and penalties, and it can be thus proportionate only by taking account of the higher form of working. The disciplining of the expansive desires to the law of measure which constitutes this higher form of working must, to be effective, begin early and become habitual. The necessary basis, therefore, of an ethical type of State is an ethical type of education.

Aristotle makes not only justice but happiness depend on what he calls “energizing according to virtue.” He finally carries his conception of work from the humanistic to the religious level, from mediation to meditation or the life of “vision,” defining God himself as pure act. It has seemed to some that the activity the individual displays in the life of vision is so disassociated from the activity that he displays in his relations with his fellow men as to encourage the ascetic excess of the Middle Ages. The altruist, indeed, would maintain that both the Platonic and Aristotelian definitions of justice, encouraging a man as they do to put his own work before the world’s work, are selfish and anti-social. A man should renounce self and give himself up to sympathy and service. But there is something, we should remind the altruist, that the world needs even more than our service, and that is our example. “Example,” as Burke says, “is the school of mankind; it will learn at no other.” Now a man becomes exemplary only as the result of either a religious or a humanistic working. The man who works religiously helps the world, one is tempted to affirm, by the very act of renouncing it. He sets his fellow men the most important of all examples—that of unworldliness. If Buddha has dealt profoundly with the form of work by which one becomes exemplary on the religious level, Confucius has shown, even more adequately, perhaps, than Aristotle, the benefits that accrue to society and civilization from a humanistic working. Confucius has summed up his teaching in a sentence: Loyalty to oneself and charity towards one’s neighbor. The altruist might accept this formula provided he were allowed to give the first place to the charity towards one’s neighbor. But to do so is entirely un-Confucian. The individual must first of all look up to something higher than either himself or his neighbor in order that he may be worthy to be looked up to in turn. Of his ideal ruler, Shun, Confucius says: “Shun was one who did nothing, yet governed well. For what, in effect, did he do? Religiously self-observant, he sat gravely on his throne, and that is all.” All that Confucius means to affirm by this passage is the superiority of inner over outer action (of which, as we learn from other passages, his monarch was also capable). Shun was, in short, minding his own business in the Platonic sense, and such was the persuasiveness of his example that others were led to do likewise; whereas, with the present trend towards “social justice,” the time is rapidly approaching when everybody will be minding everybody else’s business. For the conscience that is felt as a still small voice and that is the basis of real justice, we have substituted a social conscience that operates rather through a megaphone. The busybody, for the first time perhaps in the history of the world, has been taken at his own estimate of himself. We are in fact, as some one remarked, living in the Meddle Ages; inasmuch as the meddling is itself only an outcome of our confused definition of justice, the cynic might suggest, as an even more correct description of the time, the Muddle Ages.

Perhaps, indeed, the meddling and the muddling are not quite so widespread as one is at times tempted to suppose. There are probably still a few persons left who realize the importance of minding their own business, even though not in the full Platonic or Confucian sense. There is probably an element of exaggeration in a recent assertion that to the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” the whole American people had replied in an “ecstatic affirmative.” One should note in passing the intolerable dilution of the principle of obligation that is implied in extending to men indiscriminately what one owes to one’s own brother. At all events, no small issues are involved in the question whether one should start with an expansive eagerness to do something for humanity or with loyalty to one’s self. There may be something after all in the Confucian idea that if a man only sets himself right, the rightness will extend to his family first of all, and finally in widening circles to the whole community.

One’s definition of work and of justice in terms of work will be found to be inseparably bound up with one’s definition of liberty. The only true freedom is freedom to work. All the evidence goes to show that there is no safety in the nature of things for the idler and that the most perilous of all forms of idling is spiritual idling. The failure to take account of the subtler forms of working is what vitiates the attempts of the utilitarian to define liberty—for example, the attempt of J. S. Mill. If a man is only careful not to injure his fellow men, he should then, according to Mill, be free to cultivate his idiosyncrasy. One cannot grant in the first place that any such sharp division between the altruistic and the self-regarding elements in human nature is possible; and even if one did grant it, one should have to insist that the self-regarding virtues are the most important even from the point of view of society; for it is only by the exercise of these virtues that one becomes exemplary and so, as I have tried to show, truly helpful to others.

If society should in its own interests encourage those who work with their minds as compared with those who work with their hands, how much more should it give recognition to those who are engaged in a genuinely ethical working. It is in fact the quality of a man’s work that should determine his place in the hierarchy that every civilized society requires. In short, from the positive point of view, work is the only justification of aristocracy. “By work,” says Buddha, “a man is noble, by work he is an outcast.”⁠[84] The principle, though sound, is not, one must confess, altogether easy to apply. Though justice require that every man receive according to the quantity and the quality of his work, there is in this competition a manifest inequality from the start. One man has an innate capacity that another cannot acquire by any amount of effort. God, according to the Platonic myth, has mingled lead with the nature of some and with the nature of others silver and gold. Stress unduly the initial differences between men and one will tend to fall into some system of caste, as Plato himself tends to do, or else one will incline to fatalism, whether naturalistic or predestinarian. On the other hand, deny these differences in favor of some equalitarian theory and one runs counter to the most palpable facts. Genuine justice seems to demand that men should be judged, not by their intentions or their endeavors, but by their actual performance; that in short the natural aristocrat, as Burke terms him, should receive his due reward, whether one attribute his superiority, with the man of science, to heredity, or, with the Christian, to grace, or, with the Buddhist, to his past working.

One’s view of work and of the rewards that it deserves will determine necessarily one’s attitude towards property. From the point of view of civilization, it is of the highest moment that certain individuals should in every community be relieved from the necessity of working with their hands in order that they may engage in the higher forms of working and so qualify for leadership. If the civilization is to be genuine, it must have men of leisure in the full Aristotelian sense. Those who in any particular community are allowed to enjoy property that is not the fruit of their own outer and visible toil cannot, therefore, afford to be idlers and parasites. An aristocratic or leading class, however the aristocratic principle is conceived, must, if it hopes in the long run to preserve its property and privileges, be in some degree exemplary. It is only too clear that the members of the French aristocracy of the Old Régime failed, in spite of many honorable exceptions, to measure up to this test. Some have argued from the revelations of recent writers like Colonel Repington and Mrs. Asquith that the English aristocracy is also growing degenerate. People will not consent in the long run to look up to those who are not themselves looking up to something higher than their ordinary selves. A leading class that has become Epicurean and self-indulgent is lost. Above all it cannot afford to give the first place to material goods. One may, indeed, lay down the principle that, if property as a means to an end is the necessary basis of civilization, property as an end in itself is materialism. In view of the natural insatiableness of the human spirit, no example is more necessary than that of the man who is setting limits to his desire for worldly possessions. The only remedy for economic inequality, as Aristotle says, is “to train the nobler sort of natures not to desire more”;⁠[85] this remedy is not in mechanical schemes for dividing up property; “for it is not the possessions but the desires of mankind which require to be equalized.”⁠[86] The equalization of desire in the Aristotelian sense requires on the part of individuals a genuinely ethical or humanistic working. To proclaim equality on some basis that requires no such working will result ironically. For example, this country committed itself in the Declaration of Independence to the doctrine of natural equality. The type of individualism that was thus encouraged has led to monstrous inequalities and, with the decline of traditional standards, to the rise of a raw plutocracy. A man who amasses a billion dollars is scarcely exemplary in the Aristotelian sense, even though he then proceeds to lay out half a billion upon philanthropy. The remedy for such a failure of the man at the top to curb his desires does not lie, as the agitator would have us believe, in inflaming the desires of the man at the bottom; nor again in substituting for real justice some phantasmagoria of social justice. As a result of such a substitution, one will presently be turning from the punishment of the individual offender to an attack on the institution of property itself; and a war on capital will speedily degenerate, as it always has in the past, into a war on thrift and industry in favor of laziness and incompetence, and finally into schemes of confiscation that profess to be idealistic and are in fact subversive of common honesty. Above all, social justice is likely to be unsound in its partial or total suppression of competition. Without competition it is impossible that the ends of true justice should be fulfilled—namely, that every man should receive according to his works. The principle of competition is, as Hesiod pointed out long ago, built into the very roots of the world;⁠[87] there is something in the nature of things that calls for a real victory and a real defeat. Competition is necessary to rouse man from his native indolence; without it life loses its zest and savor. Only, as Hesiod goes on to say, there are two types of competition—the one that leads to bloody war and the other that is the mother of enterprise and high achievement. He does not perhaps make as clear as he might how one may have the sound rivalry and, at the same time, avoid the type that degenerates into pernicious strife. But surely the reply to this question is found in such sentences of Aristotle as those I have just been quoting. The remedy for the evils of competition is found in the moderation and magnanimity of the strong and the successful, and not in any sickly sentimentalizing over the lot of the underdog. The mood of unrest and insurgency is so rife to-day as to suggest that our leaders, instead of thus controlling themselves, are guilty of an extreme psychic unrestraint.

One should note a certain confusion on the part of the advocates of social justice as to the nature of capital. Dr. Johnson is reported to have said at the sale of Thrale’s brewery: “We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.” The realizing of the potentiality depended, of course, on the ability of the management, and this ability was not only a part, but the essential part, of the capital of the brewery. It is being assumed at present that the capital invested in our railways may be measured by what one may term their junk value. As a result of this and similar fallacies, both the owners and managers of the railways have been so treated of recent years as to discourage enterprise in this field of industry. It seems easy to convince the public that the railways are suffering from watered stock when what they are really suffering from is watered labor. If our apostles of service and social justice have their way, that considerable portion of the savings of the middle class that is now invested in the railways, either directly or indirectly through the insurance companies and savings banks, may undergo partial or total confiscation.

Every form of social justice, indeed, tends to confiscation and confiscation, when practised on a large scale, undermines moral standards and, in so far, substitutes for real justice the law of cunning and the law of force. To be on one’s guard against these perils of social justice, one needs that coöperation of keen analysis and imagination that can alone produce genuine vision; whereas a great number of persons are weak in analysis, and idyllic rather than ethical in their imagining. Not being able, as a result, to get at underlying causes, they are prone to doctor symptoms and to resort to what Burke calls “tricking short-cuts, and little fallacious facilities.” The apparent good turns out to be evil in its secondary consequences, and the apparent evil turns out to be the necessary condition of some good. Things often change their aspect, not once but several times, when thus traced in their ultimate effects. The ordinary laboring man, for instance, may not be able to see that the “levy upon capital,” for which he is urged to vote in the name of social justice, will finally recoil upon himself. It is not yet clear that it is going to be possible to combine universal suffrage with the degree of safety for the institution of property that genuine justice and genuine civilization both require. Taxation without representation was the main grievance of the American revolutionists; but that is precisely what an important section of the community has to submit to to-day. Can those who tax in the name of the sovereign people be counted on to tax more equitably than those who alleged the royal prerogative?

Among all the forms of dishonesty that assume the idealistic mask, perhaps none is more diabolically effective in unsettling the bases of civilized life than those that involve a tampering with the monetary standard. If property stands for work in some sense or other of the word, and if money is the conventional symbol of property, the ends of justice tend to be subverted if this symbol fluctuates wildly; thrift and foresight become meaningless; no man can be sure that he will receive according to his works. Inflation of the currency amounts in practice to an odious form of confiscation, whether it is supposed, as in Germany, to promote national interests or, as in Russia, to advance internationalism. The radical, it has been pointed out, often errs in confounding money with property and in supposing that a division of money would be the same as a division of actual wealth. Though money is only a conventional token, the nature of this token is, nevertheless, not a matter of indifference. The reason for the gold standard is simple: gold involves in its production an amount of work equal approximately to the work involved in producing the various commodities for which it may be exchanged. If for any reason gold is produced more abundantly and with less effort, or if the reverse takes place, the monetary standard fluctuates; and this is an evil, but a trifling evil (human nature being what it is), compared with that which results from the substitution for gold of paper or some other medium of exchange that when, tested in terms of work, has little intrinsic value.

The modern man is as a matter of fact being whipsawed between two contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, he is being involved nationally and internationally in an ever more complex network of material relationships which rest in turn on an extraordinarily delicate mechanism of credit and exchange. On the other hand, the various idealistic schemes that are being put forward as a substitute for common honesty, or, again, the schemes, whether economic or political, that are openly imperialistic, are undermining the confidence that is the necessary basis of credit and exchange: so that the whole elaborate structure that has been reared by the industrial revolution is in danger of collapse. The political economists who promoted this revolution were, according to Carlyle, in favor of making cash payment the sole nexus between man and man. Cash payment, however, cannot serve as a nexus between men who are spiritually centrifugal. In various parts of eastern Europe, men have already become so suspicious of cash payment that they have been forced to revert in their economic contacts to barter.

The evils I have been enumerating derive in no small degree from the one-sided notion of work that has prevailed in the utilitarian movement. The interests of property itself require that at least some members of a community should work in a very different sense, that they should limit in short their own acquisitive instincts and so serve society by setting it a good example. It does not follow that the best way to secure such work from a man is to urge upon him the interests of society. Leslie Stephen, himself a utilitarian, says that “the doctrine that each man can only care for his own happiness is terribly plausible, and fits in admirably with individualism.” It does indeed; so much so that the wisest way of reaching the individual may be to point out to him, not how his conduct will affect the happiness of others, but how it will affect his own happiness. Only in that case one must be careful to define happiness, not like the utilitarian and the Epicurean, in terms of pleasure, but like an Aristotle or a Buddha, in terms of work. One may apply this method not merely to the reining in of the acquisitive instincts, but to the control of the instinct of sex. Sexual unrestraint has wrought and is wreaking fearful havoc to society. The resultant diseases are, even more than alcoholism, a menace to the future of the white race. To approach the subject from another angle, there is an undoubted connection between a certain type of centrifugal and self-indulgent individualism and an unduly declining birth-rate. The French and also the Americans of native descent are, if we are to trust statistics, in danger of withering from the earth. Where the population is increasing, it is, we are told, at the expense of quality. The stocks to which the past has looked for its leaders are dying out and the inferior or even degenerate breeds are multiplying.

The humanitarian remedies for evils of this order seem especially doubtful. Such schemes for regulating the relations of sex as have been put forward by the believers in eugenics are likely to lead to a tyranny at once grotesque and ineffectual. On the other hand, the evidence is slight that the individual can be induced to control himself on such general grounds as the good of country or the good of humanity or the good of the white race menaced by “the rising tide of color.” Religion may be right after all in dealing with the whole question of sex in terms of the inner life. According to a French moralist, man is made up in his natural self of a little vanity and a little voluptuousness. The Christian would substitute chastity and humility. Though the humanist would moderate rather than deny entirely the most imperious form of the libido sentiendi, he agrees with the Christian in starting with the struggle between vital impulse and vital control. He would have the individual exercise the control not primarily for the good of society, but for his own good. Nowhere indeed is the opposition between pleasure and happiness more visible than in matters of sex.

The more one considers our modern emancipation, the more it becomes clear that it has been at the expense of what I have termed the centripetal element in liberty; and without this centripetal element or ethical will any genuine working of the spirit becomes impossible. How, one may ask, have men been able to deceive themselves as to the gravity of the error? One way in which they have deceived themselves, it may be replied, has been to offer work according to the natural law as a substitute for work according to the human law. As good an example as any is that of Faust who is supposed to make up for moral delinquencies by reclaiming marshlands from the sea. Carlyle, who professes to be a follower of Goethe, is even more defective in his idea of work. Instead of the Socratic “Know thyself,” he would adopt as his gospel: “Know thy work and do it.”⁠[88] Thus to disparage the effort at self-knowledge because man, as Carlyle goes on to say, is in the abstract and metaphysical sense unknowable, is simply, under existing conditions, to discredit the inner life in favor of a mere outer working. Work when conceived in this one-sided fashion degenerates into mere efficiency. Carlyle, as a matter of fact, exalts not only the efficiency of the “captain of industry” (a phrase that he apparently originated), but the military efficiency of a Frederick the Great or even of a Dr. Francia. In spite of his desperate efforts to prove to himself and others the contrary, he, therefore, tends in his philosophy to be imperialistic rather than genuinely ethical. His “hero” is at the very least a first cousin of the Nietzschean superman; they both have an authentic descent from the “original genius” of the eighteenth century.

A point worth considering is the position not merely of the “captain” but of the private in the modern army of industry. It is true that, like the rest of us, this private must find his happiness in work or not at all. One may, however, raise the question whether he may be expected to find his happiness in the type of efficiency that has been developed by the industrial revolution. This efficiency has been achieved by an endless subdivision of effort until the individual worker has tended to become a mere cog in a gigantic machine. He works with only an infinitesimal portion of himself. At times, indeed, he can scarcely be said to work at all; the machine does the working and seems to lead a less automatic life than the person who tends it. A workman in one of Henry Ford’s factories is reported to have replied, when asked his name, that he was “bolt No. 29.” A multitude of men are thus mechanized in order that the captain of industry may be “vital” and “dynamic,” or, what amounts to the same thing as the words are now used, may live in a state of psychic unrestraint. For one may affirm with some confidence that a man who thinks it worth while to pile up an income said to be greater than that of J. D. Rockefeller is not engaged in a very energetic humanistic or religious working. If the ordinary industrial private follows the example of the “captain” and sets out to be “vital” and “dynamic” in his turn, either in his own person or through his unions and their leaders, the result will be chaos; for he will thus disturb the nice adjustment of parts on which the successful functioning of the whole mechanism depends.

I am not, indeed, affirming that the multiplication of machines is an unmixed evil. This multiplication has made it possible for one man to do work that would formerly have required a dozen or even a hundred men, and so has lifted a load of drudgery from the shoulders of many and opened up to them the opportunities of leisure. “No man,” says Aristotle, “can practise virtue who is living the life of a mechanic or laborer.” But the laborer now has opportunities such as have never before existed to become something more. Unfortunately, as we all know, he is not using his relief from drudgery to enjoy leisure in the Aristotelian sense, but to seek amusements, in which he is almost as much subordinated to machines as he is in his working moments (automobiles, phonographs, moving pictures and the like). Perhaps the fault is not so much in the laborer himself as in the pattern that is being offered him by the man “higher up.”

The very unexemplary type of individualism I have been discussing can be shown to derive not only from the utilitarian conception of life in general, but from the political economy of the school of Adam Smith in particular. Let the State stand aside, says Adam Smith, and give the individual free swing (laisser faire). He will not abuse this freedom, for he will be guided by an enlightened self-interest. Now the doctrine of enlightened self-interest is not in itself superficial. It has been held by really profound thinkers like Aristotle and Buddha. But the self that these thinkers have in mind is not the self that makes the pursuit of wealth its first aim, but the ethical self that exercises control over this acquisitive self. Leave the acquisitive self without this control and the right kind of competition will degenerate into the wrong kind, the ruthless kind which was actually encouraged by the Manchester School of economics and in which mill operatives become mere “cannon-fodder” in the industrial warfare. Nor will competition of this sort have a sufficient counterpoise in sympathy or altruism. The efficiency of sympathy as a substitute for the ethical will is at all events the crucial issue in this whole movement. Everything will be found to hinge ultimately on this point in our current gospel of “service,” a gospel in which most men seem to believe as unquestioningly nowadays as they once did in the Trinity. Yet the foundations of this gospel can be shown, on strictly psychological grounds, to be highly precarious.

In the first place the idea of “service” as now understood is not Christian. The Christian serves not man but God, and this service, as we learn from the Prayer Book, is “perfect freedom.” Service in the humanitarian sense has, on the other hand, important points of contact with Stoicism. The Stoic sought, like the humanitarian, to regulate his conduct with reference to the general welfare of mankind. Important differences need, however, to be noted between the humanitarian and the Stoic. The Stoic did not hold at all or held only in very rudimentary form the doctrine of progress; he did not think of men in the mass as moving forward almost automatically towards “a far-off divine event.” Progress of this automatic type, when subjected to severe psychological scrutiny, will be found to resolve itself either into a delight in change for its own sake or a delight in change for the sake of power and comfort. The confusion between moral and material progress that the utilitarian has promoted can be shown to involve a tampering with general terms similar to that which I have already noted in speaking of Rousseau and the sentimentalists. Disraeli says that the English-speaking peoples have been unable to distinguish between comfort and civilization. The word comfort itself is an excellent example of the illegitimate transfer of a general term from one scheme of values to another. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” The American of the present day wishes to get his comfort without any preliminary mourning.

As a result of the confusion between moral and material progress the modern man has developed an inordinate confidence in organization and efficiency and in general in machinery as a means for the attainment of ethical ends. If he is told that civilization is in danger, his first instinct is to appoint a committee to save civilization. The League of Nations is itself only a super-committee.

Progress in the utilitarian sense is, however, an even less essential element in the idealistic creed than sympathy. In this matter of sympathy one must note again a difference between the Stoic and the humanitarian. If, on the one hand, the Stoic had less confidence in machinery than the humanitarian, he was, on the other hand, less emotionally expansive. Interesting questions of this kind come up, as I have already noted, in dealing with Shaftesbury and his influence. The Stoical derivation of one whole side of Shaftesbury’s philosophy is so manifest that some have sought to present him as a pure disciple of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But the fact remains that the Stoics were not sentimentalists and that Shaftesbury can be shown to be a main source of sentimentalism in England and even more perhaps in Germany. The right reason of the Stoics is indeed already taking on an emotional coloring in an English precursor of Shaftesbury like Cumberland. In their tendency to identify happiness and pleasure the utilitarians remind us less of the Stoics than of the Epicureans. The Epicurean “ataraxy,” however, did not any more than the Stoic “apathy” encourage effusiveness; neither Stoic nor Epicurean was prone to “let his feelings run in soft luxurious flow” and then call the result “virtue.” Of Rousseau’s exaltation of impulsive pity as a sufficient offset to egoistic impulse and the source of all the other virtues, I have already spoken. Of almost equal importance is Hume’s assertion, professedly on strictly psychological grounds, of an element of sympathy in the natural man, anterior to reason and independent of self-love. Sympathy becomes in turn the basis of Hume’s definition of justice. The just man for Hume is not the man who minds his own business in the Platonic sense, but the altruist.⁠[89]⁠

The crucial question, of course, is not whether a man in his spontaneous and natural self will sympathize with another’s pleasure, but whether he will sympathize with another’s pain,⁠[90] at least to a degree that will be an adequate counterpoise to egoistic impulse. The confidence of the eighteenth-century moralist on this point is already beginning to seem to us singularly naïve. Rousseau, it will be remembered, not only attempts to rear the whole edifice of ethics on the basis of man’s innate pitifulness, but asserts that this quality increases in almost direct ratio as one descends in the social scale and so gets closer to “nature.” When asked why, if the plain people were so pitiful, they crowded eagerly to see men broken on the wheel, he replied that pity is such a delicious emotion that they did not wish to miss any opportunity of experiencing it! It was no doubt for this reason that Chateaubriand’s house porter, as he narrates, regretted Robespierre and the spectacles in the Place Louis XV, where women mounted the guillotine who had “necks as white as chicken’s flesh.” For a similar reason doubtless the Spanish populace frequents the bull-ring and the ancient Roman populace flocked to the gladiatorial arena. The truth is that the psychology of the plain people in matters of this kind is not ethical at all, but Epicurean. It is pleasant, as the Epicurean Lucretius pointed out some time ago, to witness another’s dire peril of shipwreck from a safe position on the shore. In much the same way, the misery of the world, when properly dished up in the headlines, merely serves to give the ordinary citizen an agreeable fillip at his breakfast table. With the help of the sensational press, the men of to-day are indeed constantly lined up on the shore, witnessing an endless series of shipwrecks.

The outstanding trait, in short, of a populace that is “natural” in Rousseau’s sense is its irresponsible quest of thrills. The success of the whole attempt to base ethics directly on the emotions has been due in no small measure to the fact that it seemed to offer an equivalent, not only for Christian charity, but for grace, a grace that did not, like the old variety, involve humility and the conviction of sin; inasmuch as the man who transgresses does so, not through any survival of the “old Adam” in him, but because of society and its institutions. The man who has not fallen from the grace of nature into social sophistication is spontaneously virtuous. “Heaven’s rich instincts in him grew,” says Lowell of a beautiful soul of this kind, “as effortless as woodland nooks send violets up and paint them blue.” The difference between the new and the old grace is here obvious: the old grace involved a working, even though the recipient of it maintained that not he but God did the working. The fact of the working was in any case indubitable, so much so that it often imposed a severe and even ascetic control upon the natural man. Goodness by the grace of nature, on the other hand, does not require on the part of the recipient anything more than a “wise passiveness.”

Another striking contrast between Christian love and grace and the parody of these doctrines by the Rousseauist should be noted. The love and grace of the Christian lead to sharp exclusions and discriminations; whereas the Rousseauist tends to blur all distinctions in pantheistic revery. Contrast the “vision” of a Dante, for example, with its clear-cut scale of moral values from the peak of heaven to the pit of hell with the “vision” of a Walt Whitman in which not merely men and women, good, bad, and indifferent, but “elder, mullein, and poke-weed” are all viewed on the same level in virtue of what the pantheist calls love. Dante speaks of the “highest love” that built the walls of hell. We shudder at the mediæval grimness. The opposite and more dangerous extreme is to lavish what Bossuet calls a “murderous pity” upon human nature and, under cover of promoting love, to be ready to subvert justice.

An unselective love joined to a “wise passiveness” and a return to “nature” might, indeed, be justified if, as their votaries maintain, they tend to draw men to a common centre; but it can be shown that this communion is achieved, not in the real world, but in dreamland. Let us consider from this point of view the “simple life” that Rousseau and other primitivists have proposed as a remedy for the luxury and self-indulgence that have tended to increase with the breakdown of traditional standards. True simplicity of life must, it would seem, be attained by the limitation of desire; whereas the luxurious life is one in which, as Montesquieu says, “the desires have become immense.” Now the “nature” of the primitivist can be shown to be only a nostalgia of the romantic imagination so that the attempt to return to it not only expands desire instead of limiting it, but makes it infinite and indeterminate. Rousseau speaks of that “devouring but barren fire with which from my childhood up I have felt myself vainly consumed.” Chateaubriand makes his René actually flee from European civilization to the American wilderness and take an Indian bride. René speaks for Chateaubriand himself when he writes to her: “There issue forth from this heart flames ... which might devour creation without being satisfied.” Chateaubriand posed as the champion of Christianity. Yet nothing is more certain than that Christian love makes for peace and communion, whereas nostalgic “love” of the type Chateaubriand has just described makes for restlessness and solitude. The ironical contrast between the ideal and the real appears even more clearly, perhaps, in Shelley than in Chateaubriand, inasmuch as Shelley did not, like Chateaubriand, pose as a traditionalist, but came out uncompromisingly for the new ethics. “The great secret of morals,” he says, “is love.” A characteristic note of his poetry, on the other hand, perhaps the most characteristic note is that of an acute spiritual isolation.

Many of the partisans of the new liberty, a liberty based, not upon work (in the sense of inner control), but upon “love” in the sense of expansive emotion, were severely disillusioned by the French Revolution. Chateaubriand is himself one of the best types of the disillusioned Rousseauist. In his “Essay on Revolutions” he still looks upon romantic nostalgia as the true badge of the superior spirit, though he admits that the aspiration towards the “infinite” that it inspires is especially prevalent in epochs of moral decline. As a result of this nostalgia, at all events, man is never satisfied with what he has. He shatters one political form after another from sheer satiety and ennui. The movement of mankind is not steadily forward in a straight line, as the apostles of perfectibility maintain, but circular, like that of a squirrel in a cage. From the point of view of the lover of liberty society is hopeless. “If it is political truth we are looking for, it is easy to find. Here a despotic minister gags me and casts me into the depths of a dungeon where I remain for twenty years without knowing why: having escaped from the Bastille, I plunge indignantly into democracy; an anthropophagus awaits me there at the foot of the guillotine.” As we should say nowadays, overthrow the Czar and the Bolshevist has you by the throat.

Is there, then, no such thing as liberty? “Yes, there is a delicious, a celestial liberty, that of nature.” Let a man betake himself to the “religious forest.” In very similar fashion, Coleridge, after discovering that the French Revolution, theoretically a crusade for universal brotherhood, was imperialistic in its essence, abandoned hope of finding liberty among men. If a man wishes to find true liberty, he says in substance, let him go out and listen to what the wild waves are saying. Liberty is not to be found in any human form. But if one “shoots his being through earth, sea, and air” and “possesses all things with intensest love,” liberty will be revealed to him.⁠[91]⁠

It may be, however, that a man should look for true liberty neither in society nor in nature, but in himself—his ethical self; and the ethical self is experienced, not as an expansive emotion, but as an inner control. Liberty is associated, therefore, not primarily with “love,” but with work. “It is work,” as Buddha says, and not love, as the Western sentimentalist would have it, “that makes the world go round.”⁠[92] The man who works ethically grows more at one with himself and at the same time tends to enter into communion, not indeed with mankind at large, but with those who are submitting to a similar ethical discipline, and so are, in Confucian phrase, moving towards the “universal centre.” So that even from the point of view of the man who desires love, the great secret of morals is work. Love is the fulfilment of the law and not, as the sentimentalist would have us believe, a substitute for it. The psychological truth at the basis of the Christian doctrine of charity is that men cannot come together expansively and on the level of their ordinary selves. The attempt to do so results, as we have seen in the case of a Rousseau and a Shelley, in an extreme psychic isolation.

Rousseau says that he founded “an indomitable spirit of liberty” on an “indolence that is beyond belief.” True liberty, it is hardly necessary to say, cannot be founded on indolence; it is something that must be won by high-handed struggle, a struggle that takes place primarily in oneself and not in the outer world. Possibly the ultimate distinction between the true and the false liberal, as I have suggested elsewhere, is that between the spiritual athlete and the cosmic loafer. If true liberty is to survive, it is important that ethical idling should not usurp the credit due only to ethical effort. This usurpation takes place if we accept the programme of those who would substitute expansive emotion for the activity of the higher will. In the real world, as I have tried to show, the results of an expansion of this kind are not fraternal but imperialistic.

The confusion between true and false liberals, between the ethically strenuous and the ethically indolent, has also been promoted by the doctrine of natural rights. A liberty that is asserted as an abstract right, something anterior to the fulfilment of any definite obligation, will always, so far as the inner life is concerned, be a lazy liberty. From this point of view, all other “natural” rights are in a way summed up in the title of a book written by a grandson of Karl Marx: “The Right to Idleness.” We have heard asserted in our own time the abstract right of whole populations to self-determination as something anterior to their degree of moral development. To put forward a supposed right of this kind as a part of a programme for world peace is to sink to the ultimate depth of humanitarian self-deception.

To be sure, the dogma of natural rights, though it still controls the popular imagination, has been disavowed by the political theorists themselves. Unfortunately, some of these theorists, while disavowing the dogma, have retained the underlying fallacy. For example, Mr. Harold J. Laski says that, though we no longer believe in the rights of man in any abstract and metaphysical sense, we still accept them as a convenient expression of the truth that what men want corresponds in a rough way to what they need.⁠[93] The first and very elementary step in any effective knowledge of human nature, a step that “liberals” of the type of Mr. Laski have failed to take, is the discovery of the lack of coincidence between man’s wants and his needs. What man needs, if we are to believe the Lord’s Prayer, is bread and wisdom. What man, at least Roman man, wanted about the time this prayer was uttered, was bread and the circus. The gap between man’s wants and his needs has not diminished greatly, if at all, since Roman times. Whatever we may think of Christian theology, the Christian insight remains true that man suffers from a divided will: he needs to follow the law of the spirit and wants to follow the law of the members, so that he is a thoroughly paradoxical creature, for the most part at war with his own happiness.

Our endeavor at the present time, I have said, should be to deal with the law of the spirit positively and so be able to meet on their own ground those who have professed to be positive and are not. Let us take a glance from this point of view at the professional philosophers. Hume, for example, set up as a pure positivist: he was in favor of getting rid of all apriorism and planting himself on what Bergson calls the “immediate data of consciousness.” Strictly speaking, indeed, mere rationalism died with Hume. Unfortunately, Kant galvanized the corpse. His “pure reason” does not, as the reason of Descartes and the other great system-builders of the seventeenth century was supposed to do, give reality, but only empty categories. In opposition to this pure reason Kant sets up a practical reason that is led to make certain affirmations that cannot be shown to correspond with the “thing-in-itself.” By the divorce that is thus established between practice and reality, the way is opened for pragmatism which, instead of testing utility by truth, would test truth by utility; likewise for the closely allied theory of “useful fiction” and other philosophical vagaries of recent times.

Let us return from the insubstantial transcendence of Kant to Hume and his claim to be purely experimental. This claim cannot be allowed for two reasons: first, as I have already remarked, he asserts something that cannot be experimentally established—namely, an element of spontaneous sympathy in the natural man, strong enough to cope unaided with egoistic impulse. Secondly, he fails to assert something that is, nevertheless, one of the “immediate data of consciousness”—namely, an ethical will that is felt as a power of control over the natural man and his expansive desires. Deny this ethical will and the inner life disappears; assert it and one may dispense with numerous other assertions, or at least give them minor emphasis. Many other things are true, no doubt, in addition to what one may affirm positively; and “extra-beliefs” are in any case inevitable. It is desirable, however, under existing circumstances, to get at humanistic or religious truth with the minimum of metaphysical or theological complications. It is not even clear that, in order to preserve the integrity of the inner life, one needs to set up a world of entities, essences, or “ideas” above the flux. Much of the loftiest spirituality of the Occident has been associated with this Platonic idealism. On the other hand, the early Buddhists saw in a somewhat similar doctrine in India an obstacle rather than an aid to the achievement of the fruits of religion.

Kant, again, has from a strictly experimental point of view, gone too far in asserting “God, freedom, immortality”; and at the same time, from another point of view, he has not gone far enough, for the freedom of his “categorical imperative” is primarily a freedom to do, and not, like that of the ethical will, a freedom to refrain from doing. The first step surely is to plant oneself on the psychological fact of an opposition between a law of the spirit and a law of the members, a living and present fact that one neglects at one’s peril in favor of what may seem superficially more useful and agreeable. Some persons, it may be urged, are conscious of no such opposition in themselves. Some persons are also color-blind, and spiritual vision is subject to even more infirmities than physical vision.

The higher will in the dualism I have been sketching has, as I have tried to show, been very much bound up historically with the doctrine of grace and has tended to be obscured with the decline of this doctrine. It would be possible to go through the chief modern philosophers one after the other from Descartes down and show that they are least satisfactory in their treatment of the will.⁠[94] Any one who wishes to recover the true dualism must begin by exalting the ethical will to the first place. Any attempt to give the primacy to “reason” in any sense of the word will result in the loss of humility and lead to a revival, in some form, of the Stoical error. One must in this matter not only side with the Christian against the Stoic, but in general with the Asiatic against the European intellectual. It does not follow because one gives the first place to will that one is to identify it with the absolute or, like Schopenhauer, with the “thing-in-itself”; for this is to fall from positive psychological observation into metaphysics; nor, because one insists that intellect is, as compared with will, secondary, need one conclude with Wordsworth and other romantic obscurantists that it is therefore “false.”

To give the first place to the higher will is only another way of declaring that life is an act of faith. One may discover on positive grounds a deep meaning in the old Christian tenet that we do not know in order that we may believe, but we believe in order that we may know. What follows almost inevitably when the intellect ceases to be the servant of the higher will and sets up as an independent power is a lapse into the metaphysical illusion—the illusion of having confined the ocean in a cup. The most familiar form of this illusion in recent times is that of the pure mechanist or determinist. If the determinist is told in the words of the poet that “our wills are ours, we know not how; our wills are ours to make them thine,” he answers in substance that our wills are not ours and that he knows how. But his knowledge on this point is only a conceit of knowledge. He is trying with finite faculties to grasp factors that are at bottom infinite, or, what amounts to the same thing, trying to subject the higher element in human nature to the lower. The proper reply to the determinist is not to appeal to some dogma or other, but to experience. The decisive word here has been uttered by Dr. Johnson, who has claims to be regarded as the most sensible person of recent times: “All theory,” he says, “is against the freedom of the will, all experience for it.” Plant oneself firmly on this fact of experience and the way is open at one essential point for a return to common sense. We escape at once from the vast web of intellectual and emotional sophistry in which the naturalistic moralists have sought to enmesh us. The answer to the enigma of life, so far as there is any, is not for the man who sets up some metaphysical theory, but for the man who, in some sense or other of the word, acts. Now to act according to the ethical will is, so far as the natural man is concerned, to pull back, limit, and select. This supremely human act of selection the rationalistic naturalist would turn over to physical nature. The emotional naturalist, refusing to be mechanized along either Cartesian or Darwinian lines, emphasizes his vital uniqueness, his spontaneous and temperamental “me,” and its right to get itself uttered. The natural will that is thus released from control is conceived by Nietzsche as a will to power, and this would seem to have some relation to the facts. On the other hand, the notion of a Rousseau or a Whitman, that “liberty” of this type is compatible with fraternity, is very far from being experimental.

A French writer, M. Léon Daudet, has won a certain notoriety by applying to the nineteenth century the epithet “stupid.” If the century deserves the epithet at all, it is surely because of the aspect of it that I have just been discussing. The determinist tends to mechanize man and deny him genuine moral choice. The partisans of romantic spontaneity from Rousseau to Bergson have hoped to escape from this naturalistic fatalism by setting up some cosmic urge or élan vital as a substitute for moral effort. Yet a multitude of men during the past century, who acquiesced in either one or the other of these two main forms of ethical passiveness, held at the same time a firm faith in “progress.” They were drifting, to be sure, but drifting towards a “far-off divine event,” usually conceived as a paradise of peace and brotherhood. But if it is a question of drifting, there is only one direction in which one can drift and that is towards barbarism. Civilization is something that must be deliberately willed; it is not something that gushes up spontaneously from the depths of the unconscious. Furthermore, it is something that must be willed first of all by the individual in his own heart. Men who have thus willed civilization have never been any too numerous; so that civilization always has been and, in the very nature of the case, always must remain something precarious. In the words of Rivarol, barbarism is always as close to the most refined civilization as rust is to the most highly polished steel.

As a result of the denial or dissimulation of the forms of inner action on which civilization finally depends, the naturalistic era in which we are living has been especially rich in dubious moralists, from the “beautiful souls” of the eighteenth century to the Freudians and behaviorists of our own day. If the behaviorist deserves censure for seeing only matter and material causes, the tendency that appears in Berkeleyan idealists and, in much cruder form, in the exponents of various brands of “new thought,” to deny matter in favor of what they conceive to be spirit is also open to grave objection. As a result of this denial, they tend to lose their sense of the reality of the “civil war in the cave,” and so to fall into materialism from the other side. The Freudian corruption of ethics illustrates interestingly another main naturalistic fallacy. Because outer and mechanical repression of desire may work injury, it is insinuated that the repression of desire is bad per se. If one says that what is needed is not outer control but inner control, even philosophers of some standing will reply that inner control or the ethical will is only the brake on personality; and that a vehicle cannot, after all, be propelled by its brake. The metaphor, however, is utterly misleading; the ethical will is nothing external and mechanical like a brake. The man who imposes this will upon the outgoing desires is moving away from what is peripheral in himself to what is central, to what is indeed at the very centre. The humanist would not go beyond disciplining the “lusts” of the natural man to the law of measure. However, if one goes still further and “dies” entirely to the natural self and its impulses, what follows, if we are to believe the great religious teachers, is not mere emptiness, but the peace that passeth understanding.

The man who does not impose either religious or humanistic control upon his ordinary self does not usually avow that he is a mere materialist. The ethical problem would be comparatively simple if he did. The egocentric individualist is, however, prone to give fine names to his own unrestraint. As Plato says, he will call insolence breeding, anarchy liberty, and waste magnificence; and may even go to the point of deifying his own impulses. There are times when one must reply in the affirmative to the question of Virgil “whether each man’s god is but his own fell desire.” There is a sense in which one must agree with the scoffer that an honest God is the noblest work of man. We recognize readily that the God whom the Kaiser and many Germans worshipped during the War was only a projection into the religious realm of their own will to power. We are loath, however, to admit any equivalent of this imperialistic error in the champions of democracy. And yet it is not difficult to point out such an equivalent, for example, in the humanitarian illusionist, Victor Hugo. Monckton Milnes relates that when he called on Hugo at Paris, “he was shown into a large room, with women and men seated in chairs against the walls, and Hugo at one end throned. No one spoke. At last Hugo raised his voice solemnly and said: ‘Quant à moi, je crois en Dieu.’ Silence followed. Then a woman responded as if in deep meditation: ‘Chose sublime! un Dieu qui croit en Dieu.’”⁠[95] The sublimity diminishes somewhat when one observes to what an extent the God in whom Hugo believes reflects his ordinary self so that he is thus enabled to worship this self on a sort of cosmic scale. A man also frequently calls what is at bottom only an hypostasis of his ordinary self in its dominant desire either progress or justice. Thus Mr. Samuel Gompers complained that the New York Assembly of 1919 did not pass a single “progressive or forward-looking act.” We all know what this means. The far-off divine event towards which the whole creation moves is for Mr. Gompers the domination of the laboring class, with the understanding that the laboring class itself is to be dominated by Mr. Gompers or his kind. As a result of the cowardice of our politicians, this more or less divine event has at times not seemed so far off as one might wish. The attempt to bestow the word justice on personal or class interests is too familiar to need illustration.

We are dealing here with the most ancient and still the most successful form of camouflage. During the War, the French did not fail to quote a passage of Tacitus to the general effect that the Germans give fine names to what is at bottom only their own lawlessness and love of plunder. But there is in this trait nothing specifically German. The barbaric Briton, the same Tacitus narrates, complained of his Roman conquerors that “they make a desolation and call it peace.” This human proclivity, though universal, is especially marked in periods of individualistic emancipation. It is especially at such a period that one needs to remind oneself with Hobbes that words are the counters of wise men and the coin of fools, and that one is not to suppose, on hearing a fine phrase, that it coincides necessarily with a fine thing. We are put here on the track of the true office of the intellect in such a period. To set out like Rousseau to be an individualist and at the same time to disparage intellect is to enter upon the pathway of madness. In direct ratio, indeed, to the completeness of one’s break with the past must be the keenness of one’s discrimination. Otherwise one runs the risk of setting up as an “ideal” and decking out with fair phrases some unsubstantial dream—the mere ballooning out of the imagination into the void.

The imagination must, to be sure, be supreme, but it should be an imagination disciplined to the facts. If the imagination is not present, the facts will not be unified; they will remain inert and isolated. But the intellect must also be present—and by intellect I mean the power in man that analyzes and discriminates and traces causes and effects; for this power alone can determine whether the unity the imagination has established among the facts is real or whether it exists rather only in some “realm of chimeras.” The genuine man of science is not, on the one hand, a metaphysical theorist nor, on the other, a mere fact-grubber. His eminence is measured by the gift he possesses for true vision in connection with some field of facts on which he has long been fixing his attention. What may have come to him originally in a flash of intuition he is careful to check up and test experimentally by every means in his power; and at this stage he is not synthetic but analytic. His success is due to the correct relation he has established between the part of himself that perceives, the part that conceives, and the part that discriminates.

Now the true humanist deals with his facts in a somewhat similar fashion: only the facts on which he is fixing his attention are of an entirely different order. His imagination is disciplined to law, but this law is not the “law for thing.” He is tracing cause and effect, but these causal sequences are not the ones that occur in physical nature. Because there is in us, in Lowell’s phrase, something that refuses to be “Benthamized,” the romantic idealist looks with suspicion on a cause-and-effect philosophy and the keen analysis by which it can be established; but any other than a cause-and-effect philosophy is likely to fall into sheer unreality; inasmuch as reality means practically the reality of law, and law in turn means that as a matter of positive observation there is a constant association between certain phenomena either in time or space—an association that exists quite apart from the desires or opinions of the individual. If there is not a human law that is thus objective, so that the person who violates it exposes himself to certain consequences in much the same way that the person who puts his finger into the fire exposes himself to certain consequences, then the human law is not worth going in search of. A sceptic of the type of Hume would affirm, indeed, that the very idea of cause and effect is not objective but subjective, that it arises from man’s “propensity to feign.” But even if we go to the extreme of scepticism and look on life merely as a “dream whose shapes return,” it remains true that these returning shapes bear a certain constant relationship to one another; so that they are susceptible of study from the point of view of the only problem that finally matters—the problem of happiness or unhappiness. Of cause and effect in any abstract and metaphysical sense, the critical humanist is willing to avow his ignorance; just as the true man of science admits that he cannot grasp the ultimate essence behind the phenomenal relationships he is busy in tracing.

The foregoing analysis, if it is correct, suggests that the type of material progress on which the Occident has been expending its main effort for some time past, so far from promoting moral progress, is likely rather to make against it. This type of progress has resulted from imaginative concentration on facts of an entirely different order from those of the moral law. The keen analytical discrimination in the service of actual perception that gives reality—such reality as man has access to—has become the more and more exclusive monopoly of the man of science or of the utilitarian who has been organizing scientific discovery into a vast machinery of material efficiency. In the mean while, in the distinctively human realm, the imagination has been left more or less free to roam at large. It has set up a unity, as I remarked at the outset, that has not been sufficiently tested from the point of view of its reality. The unity that the humanitarian hopes to achieve among men hinges almost entirely, I have tried to show, on the idea of “service.” Men are to be brought together, one finds on analyzing this idea of service, by means that are either rationalistic and mechanical or else emotional. In either case, the humanitarian assumes that men can meet expansively and on the level of their ordinary selves. But if this notion of union should prove to be illusory, if men can really come together only in humble obeisance to something set above their ordinary selves, it follows that the great temple to humanity that has been in process of erection for several generations past is the modern equivalent of the Tower of Babel; and so we should not be surprised if it is being stricken with a confusion of tongues.

With the progressive weakening of traditional standards, the inability of the humanitarian to supply any adequate substitute is becoming apparent. The whole of the Occident seems to be at an impasse. The mere rationalist and the mere emotionalist are about equally bankrupt. It may be that our only hope is a return to the truths of the inner life. If we ourselves are unable to see the need of such a return, it is perhaps because we have reached the stage of the decadent Romans who, according to Livy, were unable to endure the evils from which they were suffering and also the remedies for those evils.

The loss of the truths of the inner life in their traditional form has involved, I have tried to show, a profound alteration in the idea of liberty. Liberty has come more and more to be conceived expansively, not as a process of concentration, as a submission or adjustment to a higher will. My whole argument thus far has been that we should seek to recover in some critical form the centripetal element in liberty that the modernist has allowed to drop out and so become thoroughgoing and complete moderns. It is a matter of no small importance in any case to be defective in one’s definition of liberty; for any defect here will be reflected in one’s definitions of peace and justice; and the outlook for a society which has defective notions of peace and justice cannot be regarded as very promising.

A good deal of the confusion about liberty, as I have endeavored to show, has been promoted by the pantheistic dreamers who have sought a substitute for the grace of God in the grace of nature, and so have obscured the distinction between the man for whom liberty is an ethical working and the man who, like Rousseau, seeks to found an indomitable spirit of liberty on an indolence that is beyond belief. The pure traditionalist, the Catholic, for example, not only avoids a particular confusion of this kind, but is in general relieved of the task of defining liberty that is imposed upon the individualist. The Church will supply him with his definition: liberty, he will be told, is submission to the will of God; and the Church will not only supply him with the general principle, but also give him guidance in the innumerable “cases” that arise in the application of it. Inasmuch as the Pope is infallible (since 1870), at least in religion and morals, submission to the will of God tends to coincide practically, though not of course in theory, with submission to the Pope.

Though the sound individualist must also have standards, it is plain that he cannot get at them in this way—not, namely, by leaning on outer authority, but rather by the coöperation of intellect and imagination I have tried to describe. The standards he has thus secured he will proceed to press into the service of the ethical will. A programme of this kind, in which imagination, intellect, and will coöperate, instead of flying asunder, as they tend to do in Pascal, for example, is, it must be confessed, easier to outline than to accomplish. Yet it is hard to see that our modern experiment can be carried through safely on any other terms. If this experiment shows signs of breaking down, the explanation is surely that it has failed thus far to achieve adequate equivalents for the traditional controls. Instead of setting up genuine standards and then selecting with reference to them, the man who professes to be modern has turned selection over to “nature” and sought to substitute for the working of the ethical will a diffuse, unselective sympathy. This tendency to put on sympathy a burden that it cannot bear and at the same time to sacrifice a truly human hierarchy and scale of values to the principle of equality has been especially marked in the democratic movement, nowhere more so perhaps than in our American democracy. It remains, therefore, to discuss democracy in its relation to standards. I shall attempt in the course of this discussion to elucidate still further, with the aid of a Socratic dialectic, my distinction between the true and the false liberal.